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10:19 PM
Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
January 27, 2015
What’s with so many people losing their passports and money and being stuck in Kiev and Vienna and Paris and sending me emails to bail them out with $2000 which they will pay back.
First, if you are stuck for bread I am the wrong person to call, surely you can do better than that.
Second, just because someone uses a name that rings a bell with you do you really think I am going to part with money because of such an email, badly written, stilted and utterly unlike the person whose name is signed below. You know that person. That person would call you on your mobile. He would yell, hey I am in trouble, go on do something, he would be frantic, in a panic, stuck in a foreign country without a penny to his name, he would not write me a polite letter requesting a loan in fractured syntax.
And yet, since this happens regularly and I now have a fairly large collection of SOS messages obviously some people fall for this silly scam. Do they really feel bad enough and are gullible enough to dispatch money to a ‘stranded’ friend?
Clearly, yes.
Otherwise why would this scam be so ongoing. I think the trick is in the first one you ever get. You think, uh oh, my friend is in trouble, need to help him. So you yell out to your wife about how he’s had his passport and wallet stolen. So, okay, fine you want to help. Call his home, call his office, call him, get it verified. You cannot really rush off to Western Union and send money. That is stupid.
By the third letter, of course, the penny has dropped and you are laughing big time. Ha, you don’t fool me.
Like those letters and sms messages that come telling you about the prize of $500,000 you have won and for a moment, for a brief, shining moment, you feel the spike of excitement and then you know, you are being gypped. Just don’t ever send money to any of these and all those widows in Africa with millions they want to park in your bank.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
If my call is so important to them, why don’t they answer it for 22 minutes?
How come when I want to, but something specific online is the only item out of stock.
When I get into a queue or lane going fast, the moment I get in, it becomes the slowest and refuses to budge.
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